No sitting down for startup buff

Richard Robinson says he enjoys the challenges of starting new business in the Internet and mobile sector, while others may see it as a headache. Wang Jing / China Daily

Richard Robinson has had plenty of success, but he can't help dabbling in new ventures

A startup company's path to success is often rocky at the beginning, and it takes an abundance of hard work to overcome the initial difficulties. But serial entrepreneur Richard Robinson can't help himself - he just keeps creating new businesses in the mobile and Internet sectors, and seems to enjoy the challenge of working with the limited resources of a new startup.

"I am happiest when I am fighting through the jungle, even with poisonous spiders or snakes, rather than running on the smooth freeway," says Robinson, standing on a swaying wobble board by his desk in the Beijing office of Yolu Co., Ltd.

The mobile-application development company is the fifth company in China co-founded by the 45-year-old American entrepreneur, and it is believed to have the brightest outlook of them all.

The hunger for a business professional network has been evinced by LinkedIn, which has grown to become the largest network of its type in the world.

Robinson and his team are attempting to cater to this demand by building Yolu (which literally means "friends' address book" in Chinese) into a mobile network for professionals.

There are very few successful start-ups that achieve exactly what they set out to in their original business plan. In practice, all companies need to adjust their business plans over time so they can bring in new ideas. Many fail before they can find the right path.

Robinson feels they have found the right path for Yolu, even though the original idea for the company - which he founded with the co-founder of Renren, China's biggest networking service, along with some other Chinese nationals - was to turn the mobile address book into a social network.

"Your mobile phone address book is really the ultimate social networking service but it's not really leveraged. The challenge is that the address book is a very crowded space that many companies want to control, like Tencent's Weixin, which is claimed to have more than 200 million users in China. That's how we realized the next thing to do is to focus on professional networking," he says.

By developing three mobile apps - Yolu Address Book, YConnect and Yolu Card Reader - Yolu has attracted millions of users based on word of mouth in the two years since its founding. After raising angel funding, seed funding and first-round capital, Robinson is now focused on bringing Yolu's products to the overseas market.

The company has been preparing for the launch of its fourth feature product, Yolu Conference, which will allow people to more easily make connections at conferences. Yolu will reveal this app next month at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Silicon Valley, an industry group for mobile companies held by Great Wall Club (USA).

Robinson describes the app as a solution to the headache of going to a conference and exchanging business cards with the people you meet, and then having to deal with those piles of cards.

"In the age of smart phones, a paper business card is the silliest idea imaginable. People have to cut down trees, smash the wood, turn them into little right angles, print them and give them to others," he says, adding that the cards may be forgotten or even set aside in a pile and never digitized.